Employers spent more money in 2006 on on-line recruitment advertising than in newspaper job ads. That has never happened before but will likely happen every year from here on. Job boards and other on-line media took in $5.9 billion in recruitment advertising revenue in 2006. Newspapers took in $5.4 billion.

The study by Borrell Associates Inc. also looks forward and I like what they see. They project that the shift to on-line advertising will continue over the next five years as Internet job listings hit $10 billion in 2011. That will represent some 13.7 percent of overall recruitment advertising dollars. Newspapers? Borrell predicts they'll earn only 6.5 percent of those dollars.

"Our projections through 2011 do not bode well for traditional recipients of recruitment spending," stated the report. "Of all forms, the only ones we see growing share over the next five years are online media and recruitment agencies." With only about one-third of U.S. job-seekers saying they planned to search the Internet for work in 2006, the report projects plenty of upside remaining for recruitment spending online.

The results that Borrell is seeing line up perfectly what we're seeing at CollegeRecruiter.com. We went on-line in 1996, so we're a decade old now. Our best year ever financially was 2004 until 2005 came along. The revenues and profits for 2005 easily eclipsed those of 2004. Then 2006 came along and its revenues and profits easily eclipsed those of 2005.

What do I see in my crystal ball? In the short-term, I'm quite optimistic. The industry is healthy, the labor market is strong but not red hot like it was in 1999 and 2000 when some employers stopped spending money on recruitment advertising because it wasn't generating any responses, and our site and products are very well positioned within the college job board niche. Long-term? Who knows. One of the great and terrible things about running a dot com is that your world changes every day. To try to make accurate predictions about what we're going to see in 2011 is to ask for a major butt kicking five years from now.